Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @05:27PM
from the that's-a-lot-more-than-144-characters dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."

Twitter says they're going to delete it after thirty days. There's a marked difference between 'delete' and 'archive'. I have no issue if someone cut and pasted the last 3200 tweets from my Twitter account but the fact Twitter says they'll delete the tweets, not archive them, is deceptive.

Why can't I see all my Tweets? My Tweet count is _,___. Are they lost?

The good news is they're not lost or gone! We have all your Tweets. The bad news is that we currently only allow you to see the 3200 most recent Tweets (this could also be construed as good news, as that number could be lower than 3200). We do not currently plan to change this limit, but we welcome your feedback - just send a mention to @feedback.

Legal acrobatics? You published it! That means that anyone in the whole internet who asked for it, got it. There should be no more expectation that you can take that back than you should be able to stop people from remembering what you said out loud. Less. Twitter themselves couldn't take it back if they wanted to.

Interesting that you analogized tweeting with saying something out loud. I'm pretty sure if someone were to record things random people say in a public place and then publishes the recordings, there would be legal repercussions.

Slapping something on twitter that wasn't yours to begin with doesn't magically make it subject to twitter's terms. You have violated the implied warranty of authority by attempting to act without the permission of the copyright holder as their agent.

Which means you get busted for infringement and your rogue post to twitter gets taken down in compliance with the DMCA. It's n

Same with the previous generations and Usenet, heck even slashdot archive everything, just face up to it, if you don't want your comments to be online forever, don't upload them in the first place! the RIAA and MPAA is having to learn this the hard way.

Sure, why not. A historical rune inscription that I am rather fond of reads"oli er oskeyndr auk strodhinn i rassinn",which apparently means roughly "Oli has been taken in his unwiped ass."We tend to think of the study of history as a dignified, if not outright dull pursuit, but there's a lot of vulgarity there, in both senses.

I'm sure that seen with the hindsight of twenty years, or of a hundred years, the texts on Twitter will have a very distinctive feel of the decade about them. And I think that as long

So how do we measure the amount of data on anything as compared to the library of congress now that the size has changed?!?!? All previous measurements now have to be remeasured using the new Library of Congress size model.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but these are of immense historical importance. Often times the big historical events are only seen as such in retrospect. So people's reactions to them tend to be heavily based on conjecture and memory rather than solid data. Say what you want about twitter, but it serves as a minute by minute log of the emotional state of people within seconds of anything happening. And yes, there is some selection bias going on in that it's only data from the kind of person who use

I've thus far stayed out of the privacy debate, but this is starting to scare me. Where is our right to oblivion, as Jeffrey Rosen put it (see this article [npr.org]). We call it a right because it represents a fundamental part of the human psyche. Thusly, we can either adapt our system to account for it or face the consequences later when the system breaks down. I have to put in a dissenting vote for this idea.

It's called "the anonymity of the crowd." If you think about it, following you around in a public place is called stalking for that reason. You have a right to go about your public business without undue and/or unwanted scrutiny, though less than you used to.

It's the same with the tweets - you agreed to post them for people to read in near-real time, not to be fodder for people to look at "forever and ever, world without end, amen and pass the gravy."

First, the concept of "anonymity of the crowd" is protected by law in places like Canada. You know, places where the government isn't bought and sold so readily because of limits on political campaign financing...

Second, nobody authorized twitter (or anyone else) to turn over the entire posting history to researchers.

Don't be stupid. Twitter lets people delete their posts [twitter.com], but you can't do the same for the stuff that the LoC has archived.

How To Delete a Tweet

If you've posted something that you'd rather take back, you can remove it easily. When you hover over your Tweet while viewing your home or profile page, you'll see a few options appear below the message

People signed up with the understanding that they could remove tweets from the public record. Turns out twitter, in handing a copy to the library of congress to

Actually, there is. Example: Cyber-stalking is the net equivalent of stalking. Both are done in public, and both are illegal. Or are you going to argue that both forms of stalking has suddenly become legal?

Just because something is posted in a public forum does NOT give 3rd parties the right to use it beyond the original agreed-upon terms, and nowhere did anyone give express consent to let their posts be aggregated by some 3rd party, such as the Library of Congress. The LoC was not a party to any agre

That flamebait reply is also public. Image this: Some years later, you are going through an important job application process. The company you're wanting to get hired at queries your name in a "public" online records archive and they find this post where you rashly label someone an idiot and decide you are unfit to work for them because it gives the impression of a hot temper.

Or perhaps they don't even personally view the post, but it was factored into a kind of "personality score sheet" by a data mining

Does anyone know how big the Twitter archive is? In terms of Libraries of Congress? Because with this new "donation", the size of the Library of Congress could double, and it will increase with every tweet.

Great. Now the taxpayers are on the hook for Twitter's backup maintenance costs. Seriously. They don't even need their own storage anymore. I'm sure, since the Library of Congress is a publicly available entity, they'll have full access to the data-sets. They can just pipe everything straight to the LIB servers then access them at will, at any time. And who the fuck is paying for all that bandwidth?

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